Today, interconnectivity over data networks continues to expand. Most companies today have an internal network, many of which provide high speed data delivery to terminals on the network. Additionally, the Internet provides interconnectivity between networks, and terminals that are located across the globe.
With the interconnectivity provided by the Internet and other networks, systems have been proposed that would allow users to license, on a per use or per hour basis, access to a software title such as Microsoft PowerPoint, games or a patent docketing software package. In these systems, once the user has been granted access to the title, the user can execute the title and employ the software as needed. Typically, the application service providers have employed a telnet type architecture that has directed the user to employ the user workstation as a terminal, while computing takes place on a remote processor that has execution access to the selected title. Alternatively, systems have employed an NFS kind of architecture that joins a remote file system into the file systems of the local user.
Other systems have been proposed that would provide access to executable programs that have a distributable component architecture. These titles, commonly written in Java, may be downloaded piecemeal to the remote user, for execution by that user on the user's local terminal.
Although such component systems can work well, they require that applications familiar to the user be re-written into a distributable architecture that allows for easy download over the Internet. Moreover, systems based on telnet technologies or on NFS technologies create problems with burdening the processing resources of the remote machine and of security.